So, the Development Team have just started work to make package creation much more straightforward.

Our plan is to create a simple command line tool that will allow you to easily create specific package 'types' and push them to one of the package feeds you have added to Deployment Manager. We’ll start by delivering a version of the tool (probably in 2 weeks’ time) that will package up the contents of an output folder into a 'generic' package type and allow you to push it to Deployment Manager’s embedded NuGet feed. Then we’ll add dedicated web application and database package types, where the tool will understand how to extract and package the appropriate stuff.

We’d be really keen to hear your thoughts on the command line tool once we ship it – would you be happy to try it out and give us your feedback?

Sure. I'd be happy to try it out. It'll remove some of the extra steps I take to create NuGet packages like copying the DLLs to the bin directory and deleting the lib directory after the deployment has completed successfully.

Another way to do this would be to change deployment manager to optionally only deploy the contents of the "contents" directory within the NuGet package.

I find with our current NuGet packaging process, using TeamCity, it's quite easy to add the DLL's to a 'Bin' sub-directory within the content folder, but it is quite a bit harder to create the NuGet package without the default NuGet folders.

At the moment, the command line tool will package up the entire contents of a folder, or allow you to configure the contents of the package using a nuspec file. Please visit our online documentation for more information regarding how to use rgpublish to create packages to deploy using DM.

Over the coming weeks we plan to add dedicated web application and database package types to the tool. When creating these packages the tool will understand how to extract and package the appropriate content.